Georg Leube serves as akademischer Rat (Assistant Professor / Adjunct Lecturer) at the Chair of Islamic Studies, University of Bayreuth, Germany. From October 2020 to September 2022, he also represents 50% of a professorship in Islamic Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. His habilitation project (monograph submitted February 2021) engages with the representational culture deployed at the courts of the so-called ‚Turkmen‘ dynasties of the Qara- and Aqquyunlu in 15th century eastern Anatolia / western Iran from an iconographical perspective.
Abstract: The short account of the final Mamlūk campaign against the Dhū l-Qādirid ruler shāh Suwār in 876 / 1471 CE by Ibn Ajā exemplifies the entanglement of historiographic poetics with the pragmatics of its author’s career, particularly in its report of Ibn Ajā’s diplomatic mission to the court of uzun Ḥasan Aqquyunlu in Tabrīz. In my contribution, I will analyze the construction of the hierarchical subordination of the Aqquyunlu under Ibn Ajā’s Mamlūk patrons, which emerges simultaneously from Ibn Ajā’s description of the economic state of the Aqquyunlu realms and his personal engagement with the scholarly configurations of the Aqquyunlu court. I will focus my analysis around the nexus of ‘culture’ (Arabic ʿmr as reflected in 15th Century CE Arabic-Islamic scholarly discourses in both maʿmūr, cultivated [land], and ʿimāra, [scholarly] foundation) to argue that Ibn Ajā’s description of the desolate economic state of the Aqquyunlu realms should be seen as inherently connected with his presentation of the desolate state of scholarly knowledge among uzun Ḥasan’s courtiers. Thereby, ‘culture’ is deployed by Ibn Ajā as an index manifesting the subordination of the ‘comparatively less cultured’ Aqquyunlu under his Mamlūk patrons.
This contribution critically engages with all three themes of the conference, arguing that Mamlūk scholarly writing as exemplified by Ibn Ajā deployed coherent textual strategies to suggest a specific interpretation of the external realms of the Aqquyunlu, thereby reinforcing the author’s own position within Mamlūk scholarly and courtly configurations.
